was calm
and even, and seemed to come from far away. There was a tremor in his,
and between whiles they watched and wondered at the flight of the moth.
It seemed attracted equally by darkness and light. It emerged from the
darkness, fluttered round the perilous lights and returned again to its
natural gloom. But the temptation could not be resisted, and it fell
singed on the piano.

"We ought to have quenched those candles," Evelyn said.

"It would have found others," Ulick answered, and he took the maimed
moth on to the balcony and trod it out of its misery. They sat there
under the little green verandah, and in the colour of the clear night
their talk turned on the stars and the Zodiacal signs. Ulick was born
under the sign of Aquarius, and all the important events of his life
began when Aquarius was rising. Pointing to a certain group of stars, he
said--

"The story of Grania is no more than our story, your story, my story,
and the story of Sir Owen Asher, and I had written my poem before I saw
you." Then, as a comment on this fact, he added, "We should be careful
what we write, for what we write will happen. Grania is the beautiful
fortune which we will strive for, which chooses one man to-day and
another to-morrow."

The idea interested her for a moment, but she was thinking of her
project to find out if, like Owen, he thought that the virtue of
chastity was non-essential in women, or if the other virtues were
dependent upon it. But how to lead the conversation back to this
question she did not for the moment know. At last she said--"You ask me
to love you--but to be my lover you would have to surrender all your
spiritual life, that which is most to you, that which makes your genius.
Do you think it worth it?"

He hesitated, then answered her with some vague reference to destiny,
but she guessed the truth. As free as Owen himself from ethical
scruples, he still felt that we should overcome our sexual nature. She
asked herself why: and she wondered just as Owen wondered when
confronted by her religious conscience. They looked at each other long
and gravely, and he told her of the great seer who had collected in her
own person all the cryptic revelation, all the esoteric lore of the
East. He admitted that she had allowed carnal intercourse to some of her
disciples while forbidding it to others.

"Evidently judging chastity to be in some cases essential to the other
virtues."

She heard him say that a sect o